Talya Zax

New York

Opinion Editor and Culture Writer at Forward

Opinion editor and sometimes culture writer @jdforward. Words @newyorker, @nytimes, @theatlantic, @washingtonpost, etc. RTs aren't endorsements. [email protected]

Articles

The Most Infamous Narcissist in Literary History Gets a Smartphone

1 week ago | theatlantic.com | Talya Zax

In some ways, Oscar Wilde’s 1890 novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, a horror-tinged Victorian critique of the perils of existing in thrall to one’s own image, is a story ready-made for 2025. The title character, a young man of striking beauty, begins the novel as a vain but apparently harmless naif. By the end, his possession of a magical portrait that ages and bears the physical marks of his sins while his own face and body remain unchangingly youthful and innocent has turned him into a monster.
How this Marc Chagall painting explains Pope Francis’ soul

2 weeks ago | jewishchronicle.timesofisrael.com | Talya Zax

“Pain is depicted there with serenity,” said Pope Francis of his favorite painting, Marc Chagall’s “White Crucifixion.”He’s right. The 1938 painting, which Chagall, then living in France, produced in reaction to horrifying Nazi crimes against Jews, is a showcase of ordered disorder. In it, a Jewish Jesus on the cross, his lower half covered by a folded tallis, is surrounded by a series of tableaus depicting Jewish suffering.
How Detective Stories Help Us Understand Human Genius

3 weeks ago | theatlantic.com | Talya Zax

It is 1765, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, age 9, has some thoughts about the musical deficiencies of his teacher, Johann Christian Bach, a perfectly competent composer and performer who has the mixed fortune of being the son of a genius—Johann Sebastian. Known as the “London Bach,” Johann Christian has taken the little Salzburgian prodigy under his wing.
How this Marc Chagall painting explains Pope Francis' soul

3 weeks ago | forward.com | Talya Zax

"Pain is depicted there with serenity," said Pope Francis of his favorite painting, Marc Chagall's White Crucifixion. He's right. The 1938 painting, which Chagall, then living in France, produced in reaction to horrifying Nazi crimes against Jews, is a showcase of ordered disorder. In it, a Jewish Jesus on the cross, his lower half covered by a folded tallis, is surrounded by a series of tableaus depicting Jewish suffering.
How a cross-dressing Gene Hackman heralded a new age of Jewish assimilation in Hollywood

2 months ago | msn.com | Talya Zax

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How a cross-dressing Gene Hackman heralded a new age of Jewish assimilation in Hollywood

2 months ago | msn.com | Talya Zax
How a cross-dressing Gene Hackman heralded a new age of Jewish assimilation in Hollywood

2 months ago | forward.com | Talya Zax

There was absolutely nothing Jewish about Gene Hackman. But he played an essential part in one of the most extraordinary Jewish extravaganzas in film history: The climax of The Birdcage, in which he plays a bigoted conservative senator, Kevin Keeley, being surreally bamboozled by the gay, Jewish, drag club-operating parents of the young man engaged to his daughter.
10 wicked ways to avoid talking about Gaza and Trump this Thanksgiving

Nov 26, 2024 | forward.com | Talya Zax

By Talya Zax November 26, 2024Welcome to Thanksgiving! If you bring up the war in Gaza or the most recent U.S. election, you will be banished from the warm company of family and friends to experience the cold hard truth of human existence, without even the comforts that gnawing on a dry turkey leg can bring to help you.
Searching for the Soul of a Country in Its Food

Nov 24, 2024 | theatlantic.com | Talya Zax

Early in Yáng Shuāng-zǐ’s Taiwan Travelogue, the narrator, on a late night train, watches her traveling companion become engrossed in a book. When she asks about it, the woman balks at the interruption. “Her soul,” the narrator observes, “seemed to slot back into her body.” A good book can briefly steal your soul, replacing it with its own. But some books make you fight for that privilege; Taiwan Travelogue is one.
Booker finalist ‘The Safekeep’ is a moving look at history’s horrors

Nov 2, 2024 | pressherald.com | Talya Zax

Isabel dislikes intimacy, and she likes order. She has invested her entire being in memory, but her memory fails her. It is 1961 in the Dutch countryside, where she has devoted her life to keeping her mother’s house intact, avoiding sharing a space with anyone too closely or for too long and not thinking about the horrors she survived – or ignored – in that very home.